February 17th, 2010 |
12:24 AM

We've had some nice weather around here the past few days and the birds have been visiting our yard in a steady stream. The sparrows splash about in the bird bath, the doves laze around by the ground level pool, and the finches and the robins take turns at the bubbling rock.

The bubbling rock is in perfect view from the patio door, right about Cassie's eye level. So lately when the bells ring I'm not sure if she wants to go outside because she has to take care of business or because she wants to chase the birds. She doesn't have a super high prey drive but the birds are mouth-sized and fluttering around and I see her instincts kick in. So before I open the door I give her the command to "go slow" and she walks out there at a normal walking pace, giving the birds plenty of time to fly away before she reaches them.

We must do this a dozen times a day. She sees the birds, she asks to go out. I open the door and tell her to go slow. The birds fly away before she gets there.

But still she hopes.

Sometimes it's hard for writers to find hope. If you don't have a submission out to an editor or an agent or even a critique group hope seems a little hard to hold onto. But if you're not putting words down on paper you won't ever reach the point of having something to submit to an editor or an agent or your critique group.

Thank you, Mary. Since my verse novel, Hugging the Rock, came out, it seems like I am always working on a novel in verse, and just verse, and just novels. :) My trouble is staying in one place long enough to finish. ::) Glad you enjoyed the article.

Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.

Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.

Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.

"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties."
--Bonnie Friedman

"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home."
--Nancy Slonim Aronie

"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is."
--Anne Rice